I have met my God and I fear He does not look favourably upon me.
I met him in 1954, when I was eighteen and wearing my mother’s old clothes. I was helping my father at the farmers market when he approached my stall. The sun shined a halo in his hair and he looked as though he had fallen from the heavens. I found my stomach pulling me to him, yearning for a moment alone with him. He rolled my name around in his mouth. ‘Lilian,’ He muttered, over and over, as though he were savouring me.
It feels like so long ago now, as I stare at his pale, blueish skin. He looks much less heavenly laying on his back, missing his arms. My father begins cutting through the ligaments of his right leg as I study his face.
I shrank the moment I first saw his dazzling smile. His teeth were almost unnaturally straight and bright – more brilliant than my own. I found myself closing my mouth to smile from then on. ‘You look so beautiful when you smile like that,’ he had said when he noticed. ‘Much better, I’d say.’
I knew then that I worshipped him.
I smile down at him with all of my teeth, still staring at his. It feels wrong to smile so fully, knowing he wouldn’t like it, knowing he wouldn’t approve or think me beautiful. I haven’t smiled with all of my teeth since he said that. Since that night when my teeth turned to pointed fangs in the farmhouse mirror.
My father repositions my husband’s body to work on the other leg and he looks more like me. His skin is not smooth or supple as it had been when I met him. His skin is so pale now, it might be translucent. I follow the trail of one of his veins as it stands out against his skin. They look like worms from my old veggie garden, wriggling their way to the surface.
I stroke his hair, remembering the way the sun had shined on him so perfectly every time I saw him. He had reminded me of my favourite cow on the farm, but I had never expected him to meet the same fate as her. I run my fingers through his hair in an effort to lay it neatly as he always had it, but it won’t cooperate.
His naked body is on full display before me and my stomach turns. I almost miss the way my stomach used to pull closer to him, as though any space were too much. It reminds me of how he had pushed my hair behind my ear when I told him that my mother had died when I was young.
‘I couldn’t imagine being without a mother,’ he had said. ‘There’s so much you haven’t learnt, isn’t there?’
At the time, I had thought that he was just trying to comfort me, and let me know that he could teach me. Now, I’m not so sure. Regardless, it was that night that my horns began to push their way through my skin in the farmhouse mirror.
I wander over to his arms, hold his hand and begin to trace the lines on his palm. He had done the same to me, reading my palm at the market. He told me of a life full of happiness, many children, a husband. I wasn’t listening very closely; his perfect hands had captured my attention.
Where my hands were rough, scarred and covered in stains, his were smooth, soft and perfect. When he had pulled his hand away, I caught him wiping his hand on the back of his pants. It made me feel so dirty.
Now, his hands are cold, his nails full of my own skin from where he had tried to fight me off. He was larger than me and still, I bested him. I can’t remember it very clearly, the feeling of my hand around his throat or the push of the knife into his belly. I trace my finger along the cut on his arm where I had slipped while trying to cut his throat.
It was all an accident, that was what I told my father when I woke him up. He looks up at me as I hold the hand of my God and I notice something different in his eyes. There is a pause, a hesitancy in the way that he considers me. I know he doesn’t believe me, but he loves me, or maybe now he fears me. It doesn’t matter; I am thankful to have him. I know that I am safe with him.
I continue along his severed arm until my finger catches on his wedding ring. It is clean, he didn’t even wear it a full day before he found himself on my father’s butcher block. I smile as I think of how pretty I had felt and how gorgeous he had looked earlier in the day. I had decided from the moment I met him that I would marry him, and spent months worrying that he didn’t feel the same.
Then, one day, he begged to buy me new clothes and I said no, that my father wouldn’t allow it. He had made some joke about my father being my captor and while it had hurt, I could understand where he was coming from.
‘He’s just old-fashioned,’ I’d said.
‘How old-fashioned?’ he asked. I gave him a quizzical look, and he chewed the inside of his mouth before he asked, ‘would he need to be asked for your hand?’
My stomach flipped and I had thought that it might crawl out of my mouth, dragging my heart with it. It wasn’t long after that that he asked the big question.
I look closely at his crackled knuckles and the dried blood on his hands. I’m not sure whose blood it is now, perhaps a mix of both of us. My hands knead my hips and I think of how he had been in the months leading up to the wedding. The way he had grown so cold to me. He seemed burned by my touch and the sound of my voice would send him storming away.
I know now, how naïve I was to think that his frustration was with the lack of guests. I didn’t know until I was standing at the altar that my father would be the only guest at our wedding.
I watch my father as he removes the evidence that can’t be eaten, beginning with the hair. I want to feel something as I watch my father shave his head. I want to feel some kind of guilt or grief but I can’t. I run my hand along my bruised hip again, our wedding night replaying in my head.
I had read about ‘sex’ in books before but I didn’t know the intricacies of the process. My father had tried to half-explain it to me when I bled for the first time, but I still felt unprepared. I had trusted that my husband would show me and guide me through it. Oh, how misguided that expectation was when I made it to his bed.
His face had contorted into a grimace I hadn’t seen before as he tossed me onto the bed. He was as strong as when he had pulled me in for a tender kiss at the altar, but this time it was too much. His hands were all over me, pressing too hard into my thighs and his hand kept wandering to my neck. It didn’t feel right. My stomach pulled away from him, not toward him. It felt wrong, he was being too rough, it was happening too fast. I tried to say that, that I was scared, that maybe we should slow down. His hand met my face before I could.
I stroke my bruised throat as I watch my father pull each tooth from his mouth, one by one. His teeth looked rotten now. He looked rotten.
My body still feels tender, the way that it had when he was done with me. My head still aches from where he’d tugged at my hair. He had leaned into me when he was finished and I laid there, waiting for the next blow when he gave me a gentle kiss on my temple. He wiped the tears from my eyes as he said, ‘sorry, honey. You can be so fucking annoying.’ I didn’t have the energy to respond and even now, I don’t know what I could have said. ‘I love you, Lilian,’ he had said before he rolled over, leaving me to put myself back together. The sound of my name on his lips made my stomach turn.
‘Lilian, you’ve got blood on your hands.’ My father nods his head back to the bathroom and I do as I am told. I know that he doesn’t want me doing ‘men’s work.’
I sit on the edge of the bathtub, just as I had when he rolled over. I had tried to see what could be fixed or salvaged from the pile of pieces I had become. My thighs were wet with my own blood and so was my lip. A sob had escaped me when I noticed the bruises on my hips. The same thought I had had in that bathroom occurs to me now, as I stare down at my broken and brutalised body.
If this is divinity, I want no part.
I wash the blood from my hands in the farmhouse sink and avoid my reflection for a moment. It was in his bathroom that I had first seen what pieces were left, my full transformation. The sight hadn’t scared me as I thought it should. I didn’t always look this way in the farmhouse mirror; my skin had been tanned and scarred but it was skin, it was human.
I look at my humanoid hands in the running water, scrubbing the blood from them. In the mirror, my imperfect skin is covered in glittering red scales that glow in a dull purple hue where he bruised me. My nails are claws, my forehead now home to horns of bone that push their way through the scales. I had thought that I should have been upset with my change but I wasn’t, I’m still not. I’m not sad, or angry, or happy. I’m at peace.
I had stared in his mirror at my naked, battered, demon-spawn body and knew that I was looking at my true self. The self that he saw, the self he hated. I notice as I stare into the farmhouse mirror, just how powerful I look. Perhaps that is what he hated.
I stare into my own eyes in the reflection of the bathroom mirror, a calm washing over me as it had in his bathroom. I knew what I had to do then and I know what I have to do now. I settle my mind and my stomach which still pulls me to him, just as it had from his bathroom. It was not to have a moment alone with the man from the heavens, however.
No, the job was not done yet.
I help my father load the pieces of my husband into empty feed bags. My husband’s face does not look as peaceful as it had, laying in his bed with a satisfied smile. He looks like a hideous doll; his skin clammy and dull. He looks like something plastic but his pieces are so soft. It was strange to think of how much I had wanted to curl into him just that morning.
I realise, as I watch the pieces of my husband fall into the pig pen on the family farm, that he could not have been a God. I had been a worthy and dedicated disciple. I did what he asked. I defied my father in favour of him and he punished me. Perhaps he had seen how he had changed me, perhaps I had never changed. A worthy God is a forgiving one. He may have been my God, but he was no God.
He bled, just as any man would.